Research On Transformations Of Foreign Academic Libraries

With the development of information technology,academic communication environment,higher education system,user needs and other aspects,as an important support for colleges,universities and research institutions to enhance scholarly competences,the academic library is facing enormous challenges in the new environment.Foreign academic libraries actively respond to changes in the external environment and implement evolutions in every aspect.Adjusting the structure of librarianship has become one of the important ways to achieve the transformation of academic libraries.So by analyzing how each kind of position established and changed over a period of time,we can get to know the focus of academic libraries and their transition paths.Based on the idea above,this paper selects the changes of librarian positions as a research perspective,in order to reveal and study the transformation paths of foreign academic libraries.First,the paper uses content analysis with KH Coder,a textual analysis software to analyze full-time job descriptions collected from a large library and information recruitment website Libjobs from January 2011 to December 2015 posted by the US academic libraries.By conducting word frequency and co-occurrence analysis,this paper sums up the characteristic of job titles,responsibilities,required qualifications and preferred qualifications as well as features of changes during the 5 years.Then,the study digs into the motivations of the changes in the position of foreign academic libraries,and analyzes the motivations from five aspects which are the theoretical basis,the information technology environment,the academic publishing and dissemination pattern,the higher education environment and the users' needs.Next,on the basis of analysis of job descriptions and motivations,this paper reveals the transformation paths of foreign academic libraries,which are changing the organization of resouces and discovery services,integrating into the field of academic research,re-planning the space of library buildings,developing comperhensive outreach services,innovating service patterns and the evaluation system,and improving the competitiveness of librarians.The transformation paths of foreign academic libraries revealed in this paper can provide references for domestic academic libraries to optimize the position setting and institutional reform.At the same time,readers who are going to start a career or practitioners seeking development in the field of library and information science can also get some enlightenments.Moreover,the results of this study provide insights on current and future curriculum design of library and information science programs.